How Not to Be a Perfect Mother

When your big moment comes, you are led into a cubicle, asked to take off your lower garments, and lie on a padded plank until The Consultant comes round. Even sitting up to read your book or ease your heartburn may be treated as insubordination and Wasting Doctor’s Time (what doctor? where?).

After a couple of hours of this persecution, a nervous woman will become hopelessly docile, too timid to ask questions even if they are burning in her heart; and the more spirited, bolshie type becomes so rude that she, too, forgets to ask the questions that make her cry secretly in the night.

None of this is any good. Plenty of people have campaigned to improve British antenatal cattle clinics, and they are making slow but sure progress. Rudeness, insensitivity and inattention are regularly exposed by the dutiful media. Occasionally one hospital lays itself open to ridicule or disgust, and all the others pull up their socks an inch or two. I did most especially enjoy the tale of the woman who miscarried and insisted she was still pregnant. She demanded an ultrasound scan, but was refused one. Eventually, she was admitted against her will to a mental hospital for being obsessively demented about this phantom baby. When she escaped and got her scan, it turned out she was still pregnant. She had only miscarried one of twins. The baby was born safely, and the hospital, according to reports, ‘apologized’. Apologized! It should have been put in the stocks!

Plenty of midwives campaign to improve the system; depending on where you live, you might be luckier than someone else. Meanwhile, there are a few ways of improving your lot:

• If you live in an area where you are expected to go to the hospital for every visit, ask for ‘shared care’, so that half your appointments are mere visits to your own GP. If you don’t like your GP, or he looks gloomy at the thought of obstetrics and new babies (some doctors positively prefer cosy chats about arthritis and golf), then for heaven’s sake change your GP. Quick. A doctor who doesn’t like pregnant women is not going to be overjoyed when you turn up with a new baby covered in mysterious spots, either, or when you dither for weeks over the whooping-cough jab. Change doctors! Now!

• At the hospital, make sure you always book the first appointment of the morning, and get there 20 minutes before it. Then nobody can say, ‘Doctor’s running a bit late this morning.’

• Take something to read. The hospital supply of mysteriously stained two-year-old copies of OK! magazine can seriously damage your morale.

• Alternatively, knit. Everyone knits in antenatal clinics, sometimes managing a whole sweater while waiting for God to sweep in in his white coat. Or you can score points over bossy solid nurses in clumping shoes by arriving in an elegant flowing dress and doing petit-point embroidery. On no account wear a personal stereo or you will miss the magic moment when they mumble your name, and have to wait another hour.

• When you do see the consultant, mention how long you waited, if you did. He might like to know, and he has a lot of power in the class-ridden hospital society. Tell him no wonder your blood pressure is up.

• Write down your questions before you go in. Somehow, lying half-naked on a high table being prodded by a strange man in a hurry and a brisk, bored midwife, one tends to forget things. But stay friendly; let the midwife see that you respect his or her experience and opinions as much as the doctor’s, if not more.

• If the midwife leaves you alone to take your clothes off, and leaves your notes on the table, for heaven’s sake read them. Of course it is not snooping.

• If you are really worried, don’t hide it. With my second child I was irrationally convinced, near the end that something was wrong; but went through almost the whole of my 32-week appointment with a stiff upper lip. One casual kind word from my consultant, just as he was leaving after the regulation 45-second prod, brought on a flood of tears. It saved the day. Back he came, ordered the nurses to fetch a loudspeaker so that I could hear Rose’s heartbeat, gave me a kick-chart to fill in, and sent me home to the first peaceful night’s sleep for weeks. The dreadfully businesslike and abrupt manner of medical people sometimes creates a sense that they are hiding some awful secret from you. In fact, they are just brooding about their next pay rise and whether gorgeous Dr Gupta in Intensive Care really meant it about the Nurses’ Home dance on Friday.

• Read all the books about pregnancy and birth that you can bear to. Go to classes run by the National Childbirth Trust if you can. If you can use terms like placenta, membranes, engagement, cervix and so on, the staff might talk to you almost as an equal. It is roughly the same principle you use for outfacing a contemptuous young garage mechanic who keeps going on about tappet-adjustments.

• If they won’t talk to you, fight. It is often the youngest doctors who behave most like pigs. Remember all the time whose baby it is. Here is a piece of dialogue from my own past:

JUNIOR DOCTOR (bustling in): Mrs, erm, er, Heiney. Er. (addressing midwife). Is this one complaining of any problems?

ME: A bit of a problem with heartburn and bad leg cramps.

MIDWIFE: She has heartburn and leg cramps, doctor.

JD (still to midwife): Oh. Yes (scribbles prescription).

Give her that (tries to depart).

ME: Hang on, doctor, sorry, what is this prescription for?

JD (as if suddenly noticing me): You just take it to a chemist and he will give you some medicine (tries to depart again).

ME: I will bloody well not take it to a chemist. I will take it to my GP and ask him for a civil answer. Why should I take anything when you won’t even spare me thirty seconds to say whether it’s supposed to be for the heartburn or the legs?

(Doctor departs, but his ears are becoming satisfyingly red.)

MIDWIFE: Oh, I am sorry about him. But what can we do?

Such little playlets are being played out every day around the antenatal clinics of the nation. Just make sure your part is a speaking one. And don’t worry about making enemies; at least the fragmentation of care in Britain means that you may never see the same doctor or nurse twice, let alone be delivered by anyone whose name you even know. So you can stand up for yourself without much risk of meeting your adversary the next time in advanced labour. If you do, you could always brazen it out and say, ‘Oh, how lovely that it’s you, someone I know.’

Of course, it would be better not to have any fights at all. I am just saying that if you do, it probably isn’t your fault, and I hope you win.

• Finally – a useful hint for staying happy during hospital appointments. Don’t watch ER, Casualty or Holby City. In recent years it would seem that the production team of the latter programme has invested in a rather expensive bit of kit which simulates a womb, for filming Caesarean operations. As a result, every other plotline involves an emergency Caesarean, often involving death, mayhem, or the discovery that the baby is an IVF error or product of adultery, because it is entirely the wrong colour. Do yourself a favour, watch Friends instead.

As to the usual physical discomforts of pregnancy, there are a few things to be done, but most of them too often repeated to be worth enumerating again. At one stage in my childbearing career I decided that if one more kind person told me to eat a slice of bread before getting up (for the sickness), stand properly (for the backache) and take Milk of Magnesia for the heartburn, I would knock them down and sit on them. One acquaintance of mine swears blind that raspberry-leaf tea cures sickness, backache, heartburn and cramps in the legs, and that gipsy women who drink it never have difficult labours. The fact that it tastes like shredded lorry-tyres is neither here nor there.

There are a few things, however, that I wish I had known earlier:

Sickness

If you are, you are. The usual remedies may not work. If you are going to go on throwing up, at least you can manage it gracefully; embarrassment and tension are worse than the actual puking. Get everyone to save you clean airline and coach sick-bags, and carry a stock, with rubber bands to seal them, a damp flannel, and a few tissues. Try to retain a sense of humour when people in the street think that you are a drunk. If you throw up your breakfast, there is no harm in eating another one, to stop you feeling rotten later on. I once had three breakfasts, two unsuccessfully, and presented a live radio programme at nine o’clock. Curiously, going live on the radio completely cured the sickness, as it does hiccups.

Heartburn at night

Cured by sleeping with your shoulders propped up on four pillows, like El Cid lashed upright stone-dead on his horse. But:

Leg cramps

Leg cramps are best cured by having your legs propped up on another four pillows. You feel like a banana. The other cure for leg cramps is to have a sleeping partner trained to fling himself on your calves at the slightest moan and begin massaging the lump away. Mine was so well-conditioned after two pregnancies that he hurled himself at my legs if I so much as turned over in the night.

Above all, forget occasionally that you’re pregnant. In my first pregnancy, I had all the above symptoms and more, but went off sailing, walking round Ushant, and on a fortnight’s trip down the Mississippi for a newspaper, travelling hard, hitching rides on towboats and tugs, and walking alone round the Vieux Carré of New Orleans at seven months gone. Interestingly, every single symptom vanished for the duration of the trips. As soon as I got home, every single one came back.

There are some useful things you can do during a first pregnancy, although really the best activities are travel, taking holidays and earning extra money, all of which will get difficult after the birth. If you must do useful things, you could make detailed preparations, trimming cradles and laying out tiny vests, even buying nappies. I couldn’t bear to do this; it seemed too much like counting your chickens before they hatch. I preferred to lie in hospital while my poor husband went flying around to stock up on zinc-and-castor-oil cream and bolt the wobbly old cradle back together. If you share my superstitious dread, but still feel a need to be doing something and getting in control of the future, there are a few general things to do, make, and consider without tempting fate by assuming good luck in Month Nine. Here they are:

Consider your house

Or flat. Is it warm? Is it easy to get warm? Are there bits of it where you spend a lot of time, like the kitchen, which are always cold and draughty? If so, is the cold area close to a warm area where the baby can doze in its basket or sit in a chair watching you?

Is your home a pleasant place to be all day long, or just somewhere you have always flopped after a day’s work? You may not want to decorate a nursery, but it pays off handsomely to decorate your main rooms and landings and bathroom. At no other time, probably, will you spend so much time in your own home as when you have a new baby.

Give up any idea that a baby is a small thing which takes up little space. The amount of equipment that accumulates around the most economically run infant is prodigious. It certainly needs a whole chest of drawers to itself. Do you have any storage space to spare? No? Right, what are you going to throw out?

Consider your transport

If you have a car and are about to change it, it might pay to go for a four-door model. The grip that even the tiniest baby can get on the pillar of a two-door car, when you are trying to manoeuvre it into its seat, takes some believing.

Consider your clothes

Maternity clothes should no longer be much of a problem. All the old grumbles about viscose sacks with ‘touches of interest at the neck’ are out of date. Mail-order firms and specialists have pretty, folksy clothes for those whose instincts in pregnancy turn a bit more floral than before. High-street chains and XL shops have T-shirts and drawstring pants in a huge range of sizes, which will do for all but the largest mothers-to-be to wear casually at home; saris, kaftans and wild ethnic drapes are fun for evenings and will furnish the future family dressing-up box. It pays to have one really nice pashmina.

A working wardrobe can be more troublesome if your office is formal. Specialist maternity shops provide trouser suits and boring coat-dresses which will help, but if you spend too much money you will resent it. One of the best answers is to borrow off friends or relatives: a particularly fetching Popeye sweatshirt and a lovely striped cotton maternity blazer I know of have draped five babies in three families, including two of mine. The journalist Valerie Grove mistily remembers one tent-dress by Monsoon which got used in eight pregnancies (various incumbents) around literary North London in the 1970s, and finally fell to bits on her sister in Sydney, Australia. Publisher Helen Fraser mysteriously mentions the virtues of ‘army surplus’, raising an intriguing picture of lumbering camouflage printed guerrillas moving in on a maternity ward like an overweight platoon of the SAS. A BBC researcher drove half her department wild by simply getting out her old school gymslip (she was a tubby 12-year-old who turned into a slim swan) and flouncing around like an extra in a blue St Trinians film.

You may have trouble with bras: if you start off small-breasted, you are just as well off buying larger and larger sizes of good conventional bras, but if you start off at 38 or so, you will fall prey to the nursing-bra trade. Most nursing bras are profoundly depressing, droopy, misshapen and punitively uncomfortable, and drive you half-mad with frustration and gloom. The ones marketed by the National Childbirth Trust are a bit better – at least you can try them on and exchange by post, and not trudge mournfully around every cubicle in town trying to fit your twin Zeppelins into something bearable.

But on the whole, as I say, maternity clothes are not a problem. Apart from official maternity wear, there are floppy smocks, homemade tents, large-size men’s tracksuits and sailing sweaters, husbands’ jeans worn with huge safety-pins, and all the ‘ethnic’ flowing cottons. Those who do best are cheerful, stylish women who can take a joke. The important thing is to accept that you are what you are – pregnant. You don’t need to look sexy or alluring. Clean shiny hair, clear bright colours and a pleasant smile will do, It’s not for long.

Once the baby is born, you have definite needs which it pays to anticipate. Make sure you have washable things; forget the dry-clean only culture – it’ll break your heart, and your bank. You need smocky tops that push up from the waist for feeding (a good costume for the first few weeks, with or without a winter sweater, is your favourite old cotton maternity shirt worn loose over trousers – then baby can be sick on it without ruining a sweater). Before you go to hospital, it pays to put a few easy, practical clothes together at home in a place where you can find them quickly. I used to long for some simple garment like a Babygro to haul myself into: a Mummygro. With feet.

One final point on clothes: I used to get very cross at tights which crept gradually down over the bump, even if labelled ‘maternity’. When I asked my friends what they did (I told you pregnant women get pretty intimate in their conversations), I found that everyone had the same problem. Some switch to socks; one used over-the-knee stockings with garters, and got varicose veins from it; several wore a size larger and put them on back-to-front (swivelling the feet, which is not terribly comfortable) and another simply cut the tights down the front and wore knickers on top. (Like Superman. Now we know what was wrong with him! He was pregnant!)

Consider the baby’s clothes

If you did nothing at all about these before the birth, you could still send your friend or husband down to the corner chemist to buy five all-in-one suits and five vests, and survive perfectly well for several weeks with a new baby, just adding disposable nappies and a warm little blanket. If you have knitting grannies, aunties and well-wishers, it would help to steer them on to something actually useful: lacy cardigans are terrible, because the baby gets its fingers caught in the holes; most cardigans have far too narrow sleeves for easy dressing, anyway. Wide, loose-armed square sweaters are simpler, and quite smart; best of all is to set the knitters to making a supply of tank-tops (sleeveless slipovers). They look wonderful in stripes, pastel or bright; you can drag them on in seconds over a Babygro, or pyjamas, or another sweater, just to keep the baby a bit warmer without the ordeal of sleeves.

If you find a good source of secondhand clothes to lend or buy, hang on to it!

Finally, consider your duty

The responsibility of a baby can seem huge, vague and impossible at times. Too much reading about infant care and bonding and imprinting and early influence can stampede you into a tearful panic. It can depress you into feeling that life will be a dreary round of nappy-changing and fiddling around with sterilizers, broken only by earnest coffee mornings with other sick-stained Mums in a litter of hideous toys. Clinics hand out leaflets about parenthood, carrying frightful ‘Specimen Daily Routines’ like this one:

0630 Mother gives baby early feed, settles baby. Prepares nourishing breakfast for husband and self. Rinses out overnight nappies, pegs to dry. 0730 Mother eats breakfast, feeds baby, loads washing machine, changes Napisan, cleans kitchen, prepares vegetables for midday meal.

and so on, all day, with never a line suggesting: ‘Mother reads paper, walks round garden, goes out and gets haircut, goes to drunken lunch with friend.’ It is fatally easy to confuse the baby with the bathwater: daily routines, crossover vests, coffee mornings and the peeling of nourishing vegetables for husbands are all no more than bathwater. All that is really going to happen is that you will become responsible for a small, highly entertaining, amazingly tolerant and self-contained person. Your only duty is to keep this person fed, clean, warm and entertained. There is no reason why you should stay in the house, ironing sheets or baking like a ‘real’ mother, if you don’t want to. New babies are completely portable, and care very little where they doze and wake and feed, as long as you are there. Things will change later, but by then you will be expert enough to adjust matters to suit yourself. It is pretty rare for a normal, sober, undrugged woman to do a baby any actual harm; as long as it is fed and clean and warm and has a place to sleep in peace, it will do fine, and probably not even cry much.

Incidentally, if you have doubts about whether you will love your baby, because you think other people’s children are horrid, squirmy, snotty, damp pink things, do not worry. It is quite possible to have babies of your own (sweet-smelling, perfect and brilliant) and still perceive other people’s as revolting and dull. Nature is very crafty. And the actual tasks of babycare are not bad at all, once a real baby is involved; you may be repelled by ‘parentcraft’ classes with a grinning plastic doll and frayed terry nappies, yet really enjoy bathing and changing a real, kicking baby of your own.

Your baby’s father needs to know all these things, too. He may be feeling as uncertain, excited and nervous as you are. I have deliberately kept fathers in the background in this book; not because that is where they ought to be, or where my own husband is, but only because the moments when a mother most needs support are precisely those lonely times when fathers are off somewhere. The office day, the factory day mean long stretches of paternal absence. The promptings of biology mean that in the first year, even the first three years, and even when both parents have jobs, mothers move fast and urgently towards a child’s distress even if father happens to be moving that way too (couples in which the father gets up at night to the baby frequently report that the mother lies awake anyway until he gets back). Some inbuilt tolerance seems to make women more patient with whiners and clingers and vandals and food-flingers. But even so, the more closely a father is involved from the start, the more he will enjoy his babies and the less isolated and solely responsible you will feel.

Men do have a different style of babycare; I never got a child back from my husband complete with the same number of shoes, socks, hats, gloves, etc. that I handed it over with; but what the hell? Socks are not everything. If he is the sort who baths the baby in hospital, plays, tosses, bounces, gets the first smile to himself, and confidently takes charge of a tiny baby round the clock, then you are lucky and he is lucky and the baby is very lucky indeed. But it doesn’t always happen like that; I am writing about under-threes, and some men just can’t do much with them, or won’t. If that happens, the babies still have to be looked after by someone, and you are the one who is left with no choice. That is why I have written for mothers, about mothers, and with the help of mothers; any father who picks up anything useful from the book is more than welcome, and any father who shoots it down in scorn is, at least, involved. Good luck to him.

If the whole prospect still overwhelms you, do something small and absorbing. Go out, buy some unbreakable fishing line, and restring all your favourite bead necklaces on it. Then you have something the baby can play with and hang on to while you carry it around; and you keep your favourite beads.

Or else earn some extra money, or sell something, and set up a baby fund; there is no time in your life when a few extra pounds will make more difference. One friend combined the problems of no storage and no savings, booked a market stall for a day, looted the house, and made £300 in one afternoon. She still thinks that the sight of a hugely pregnant woman standing on an orange-box shouting her wares (‘a sixties Beatle scrapbook … a personal stereo … a wok …’) was enough to intimidate the population of South London into buying it all. Besides, it was an adventure. Just because you are about to have The Biggest Adventure of a Woman’s Life doesn’t mean you can’t have a few small ones as well.